Tense: tense
In English, Tense is a feature of verbs that specifies the time when the action took / takes / will take place, in relation to the current moment or to another action in the utterance.
Pres: present tense
The present tense denotes actions that are happening right now or that usually happen. All verbs with the PTB tag VBP or VBZ have this feature. Subjunctives with the PTB tag VB also have this feature.
Examples:
- She goes home.
- I suggest that he see a doctor.
Past: past tense
The past tense denotes actions that happened before the current moment. All verbs with the PTB tag VBD and VBN have this feature.
Examples:
- She went home.
Note that the pluperfect and future tenses in English are constructed periphrastically. For example, I had been there is past perfect (pluperfect) tense, formed periphrastically by the simple past tense of the auxiliary to have and the past participle of the main verb to be. The auxiliary will be tagged VerbForm=Fin|Mood=Ind|Tense=Past and the participle will have VerbForm=Part|Tense=Past; none of the two will have Tense=Pqp.
Treebank Statistics (UD_English)
This feature is universal.
It occurs with 2 different values: Past, Pres.
24574 tokens (10%) have a non-empty value of Tense.
2779 types (15%) occur at least once with a non-empty value of Tense.
1559 lemmas (10%) occur at least once with a non-empty value of Tense.
The feature is used with 2 part-of-speech tags: en-pos/VERB (19860; 8% instances), en-pos/AUX (4714; 2% instances).
VERB
19860 en-pos/VERB tokens (59% of all VERB tokens) have a non-empty value of Tense.
The most frequent other feature values with which VERB and Tense co-occurred: Mood=Ind (14288; 72%), VerbForm=Fin (14288; 72%), Person=EMPTY (14244; 72%), Number=EMPTY (14233; 72%).
VERB tokens may have the following values of Tense:
Past(9648; 49% of non-emptyTense): was, had, said, were, been, made, got, called, told, usedPres(10212; 51% of non-emptyTense): is, are, have, ‘s, has, ‘m, want, need, am, goingEMPTY(13610): be, have, get, know, go, do, see, take, let, make
| Paradigm be | Pres | Past |
|---|---|---|
| Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=1|VerbForm=Fin | am | was |
| Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|VerbForm=Fin | is, 's, s, ai | was |
| Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|VerbForm=Fin | was | |
| Mood=Ind|VerbForm=Fin | are, 'm, 're, m, r, re, is | were |
| VerbForm=Part | been |
AUX
4714 en-pos/AUX tokens (49% of all AUX tokens) have a non-empty value of Tense.
The most frequent other feature values with which AUX and Tense co-occurred: VerbForm=Fin (4486; 95%), Mood=Ind (4486; 95%), Person=EMPTY (2883; 61%), Number=EMPTY (2880; 61%).
AUX tokens may have the following values of Tense:
Past(1366; 29% of non-emptyTense): was, did, been, were, had, ‘d, got, wasePres(3348; 71% of non-emptyTense): have, do, is, are, has, does, ‘ve, am, ‘m, ‘sEMPTY(4865): will, can, would, be, could, should, may, ‘ll, have, do
| Paradigm be | Pres | Past |
|---|---|---|
| Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=1|VerbForm=Fin | am | was |
| Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|VerbForm=Fin | is, 's, s | was |
| Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|VerbForm=Fin | was | |
| Mood=Ind|VerbForm=Fin | are, 'm, 're, r, m, re, ai | were |
| VerbForm=Part | been |
Relations with Agreement in Tense
The 10 most frequent relations where parent and child node agree in Tense:
VERB –[conj]–> VERB (1147; 61%),
VERB –[remnant]–> VERB (2; 67%),
VERB –[amod]–> VERB (1; 100%).
Tense in other languages: [bg] [cs] [de] [el] [en] [es] [eu] [fa] [fi] [fr] [ga] [he] [hu] [it] [ja] [ko] [sv] [u]